With last Wednesday’s Apple iPhone 5 unveiling, and the recent Nokia Lumia launch, mobile is on top of the media agenda. But as the screen size and connector stories die down, the question of “when will my mobile phone become my wallet?” rises up once again. The terms “mobile wallet” and “digital wallet” should not be used interchangeably. Your mobile phone won’t be the one device that will forever banish your leather wallet to the back of a drawer. It will, however, be an important access point to your digital wallet — which will live in the cloud and follow you wherever you go. NFC is a technology, not a strategy.

Bank of America executives can’t stress strongly enough how seriously they take their mobile banking initiatives due to consumer research released on Tuesday by Google around American attitudes toward mobile computing and mobile banking.The search engine giant’s statistics said mobile banking websites are one of the six types of online portals that users expect to load in short order, five seconds or less.That means, Google says, that banks can no longer afford to not provide customized tablet and smartphone services.More proof: 67% of surveyed consumers agreed with the statement, “A mobile-friendly site makes me more likely to buy a product or use a service.”

Over the last few weeks, the Pittsburgh company has forged deals with three universities and it is eyeing others within its markets as more contracts for campus ATMs, branches and other banking services are put out for bid. At least two dozen schools have “told us that they are going to be approaching the market in the next six months, looking for partners,” Nick Certo, senior vice president and manager of university and workplace banking said.

Stripe, an online payments startup backed by Peter Thiel, is expanding into Canada to ramp up competition with EBay’s PayPal and widen its merchant base in a country with few options for transactions over the Internet. Any individual or business based in Canada can start using Stripe to collect payments starting today, the company said in a statement. Stripe, based in San Francisco, charges customers a flat fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for every transaction and supports major credit cards. Most merchants in Canada currently go through banks to set up online payments, which can be a lengthy process of faxing documents and providing personal information, said Tobias Lutke, chief executive officer of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa.

We often talk about mobile banking from a technological point of view, about the fancy new tools which allow customers to view the status of their accounts or execute simple transactions. Many have the view that mobile banking is a simply new channel for online banking, bringing the functionality available on the desktop to the mobile phone. However, for mobile banking to be truly successful, it needs to be much more; it needs to be a new way to do banking, a permanent space for the bank and its customers to interact. In a presentation from Miguel Montes and Pol Navarro of Banco Sabadell made a very compelling argument for a more powerful, flexible, and human banking. They clearly showed that while mobile banking is being driven by technology, it will only be successful by fostering new processes to improve customer service and sales.

American Express is launching an integration with Apple’s Passbook today. You won’t be able to pay with AmEx using Passbook, but you will be able to get details on recent transactions as they happen. “We’ve essentially re-imagined what’s possible for the newly launched Apple iOS6 Passbook technology – taking it beyond just mobile ticketing, coupons, and loyalty cards,” AmEx spokesman Brad Minor told me in an email. “This is an entirely new use-case for Pass that makes it useful every day, and not just for specific occasions.”